Sunday, December 3, 2017

I didn’t intend to write a sequel to last week’s column on the Senator Shehu Sani tweet that invited sarcastic, ill-natured
grammar trolling from a paid agent of Governor Nasiru El-Rufai. But the social
media circus that my column elicited necessitated this follow-up. There are
lots of people who genuinely want to learn about the appropriate uses of tenses
but who are bewildered by the cacophony of social media hooey masquerading as
expert opinion on this issue. This column is for them.

But I need to mention right off the bat that Senator
Sani is far and away the most imaginative user of the English language in the
current Nigerian Senate. His puns, witticisms, and humorous yet thoughtful metaphors
have enlivened an otherwise dull political climate. His speeches on the floor
of the Senate have made by far the most memorable quotes in the life of this
republic. So no one can deny that Senator Sani is a masterful and proficient
user of the English language. The minor grammar slips in his social media
status updates, which we are all liable to make, in no way detract from his
facility with the language.

And just so I am not misunderstood, I actually wholly
align with the sentiments encapsulated in the senator’s tweet and decry the
infantile pettiness of his critic who suggested that because he transposed
tenses in his tweet he should take an elementary school competency test.

With that out of the way, it helps to realize that
this isn’t political punditry; it’s bare-bones, technicist analysis of grammar
and usage, which isn’t amenable to the interpretive liberties of political
punditry. Several of the people who are “defending” the senator’s
tense-challenged tweet are general-interest commentators on social and
traditional media who imagine that everything is subject to pontifical dialogic
brawl. As psychologist Abraham Maslow once pointed out, "If the only tool
you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail."

Their hammer is punditry and they see every issue as a
“perspective,” as an “opinion.” That bespeaks cognitive unsophistication. I am
both a political commentator and a language enthusiast, and have learned to
separate political commentary from my language and grammar interventions.

English
Mumpsimuses

The political-commentators-turned-overnight-grammar-mavens
who are nonetheless mistaken in their defense of a demonstrably wrong grammar
usage but who persist in their error out of vanity and a need to nurse their
hurt egos fit in nicely to a group I once characterized as “English mumpsimuses”
in my April 9, 2017 article titled, “English,Indigenous Language Instruction, and National Development.”

What is, or who is a, mumpsimus? Well, there are two
senses of the term in linguistics and general usage. Mumpsimus is defined as
“adherence to or persistence in an erroneous use of language, memorization,
practice, belief, etc., out of habit or obstinacy….” It is also defined as “an
error to which one clings after it has been thoroughly exposed.” A person who
is wedded to, or who persists in, mumpsimus (that is, pigheaded insistence on
clinging to an error after it has been shown to be an error) is also called a
mumpsimus.

The term came to mean stubborn resistance to
correction because an old, uneducated monk in the 16th century mispronounced
the Latin word “sumpsimus” as “mumpsimus” during a religious observance. When
he was corrected, he refused to take correction and intentionally persisted in
his error out of prideful stubbornness.

There are many mumpsimuses in Nigerian cyberspace who
defend, and persist in, provably wrong usage. They deny the admissibility of correction
and, when they can’t sustain their defense with the resources of logic and
evidence, claim that English isn’t their native language, or that they are
“creative” people who are taking liberties with the rules, who are bending the
rules.

Well, to bend the rules, you first have to know the
rules. Dalai Lama XIV echoed this sentiment when he said, “Know the rules well,
so you can break them effectively.” Pablo Picasso said it even better: “Learn
the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” You can’t betray unfamiliarity
with the basic rules of grammar and claim to be “creatively” bending them when
you are called out.

Someone even called the rules of grammar “false
rules”! Since language, every language, is inherently rule-governed, the notion
that time-honored grammar rules, which are organic to the language, are “false”
has to rank as the most comical defense of bad grammar I’ve encountered. No
language is arbitrary or anarchic. Of course, rules change. That is what makes
languages endure. A stagnant, inflexible language sooner or later withers and
dies.

But changes to the rules of language don’t take place overnight—
and certainly not because some mumpsimus petulantly wills it into being on
social media. Language change is usually a gradual, complicated, osmotic, even imperceptible,
process. For example, tautologies (such
as “most unkindest”) and double negatives (such as “I don’t want nobody”) were
perfectly permissible during Shakespearean times, but have been stigmatized in
the language since the 1700s, and are now considered solecistic. (For more on
this, read my August 9, 2015 article titled “Shakespearean Expressions that Sound Illiterate by Today‘s Standards.”) On the other
hand, many expressions and usage patterns that were frowned upon generations
ago are now accepted and socially privileged.

However, every language consciously or unconsciously
polices boundaries of what is considered correct and acceptable usage at
particular times either through curricular tyranny or through social and
symbolic pressures. Plus, some rules hardly change in language. One of them is
tense, especially the present tense. You don’t get to choose when to use the
present, past, and future tenses. The fact that even otherwise educated and
proficient users of the language can defend an incontrovertibly ungrammatical
use of tense and fancy themselves as doing anything other than embarrassing themselves
shows that it won’t hurt to occasionally bone up on basic grammar lessons like
the meaning, uses, and functions of tenses.

That’s what I intend to do today for the benefit of
people who want to learn. I will use the senator’s tweet as an example to
instantiate the rules.

Tenses
in English

There are primarily three tenses in English: present,
past, and future tenses. I will only discuss the present tense because there is
no space to discuss all of them and because only the present tense is relevant
to this intervention.

The present
tense has four sub-categories, and they are “simple present,” “present
continuous,” “present perfect,” and “present perfect continuous.”

The simple present expresses habitual actions that are
not bound by time. Example: “Our economy grows.” Here, the sense is that this
growth is not limited by time. That’s why saying “our economy grows by 1.4%”
can only mean that our economy grows by 1.4% in perpetuity. That’s logically
and factually impossible since the no country’s economy grows at the same rate
forever. In fact, the Nigerian economy grew by 0.72 percent in the second
quarter and shrank in previous quarters. The simple present tense also
expresses general, enduring truths such as, “our economy grows when we have
leaders who have a clue.”

The present continuous tense expresses actions that
are occurring now, and typically combines a verb to be (such as “am,” “is,” and
“are”) and the “ing” forms of action verbs. Example: “Our economy IS GROWING.”

The present perfect tense expresses actions that show
a continuity between the past and the present or that show actions that began
in the past but are not finished yet.” Example: “Our economy has grown 1.4
percent.” It means the growth started at some point in the immediate past but
still subsists now because we are still in the same timeframe. That’s what
Senator Sani should have written if we were still in the third quarter when he
tweeted.

A defender of Senator Sani on Facebook wrote: “AS
Aruwa should understand that the Distinguished Senator was right for using the
simple present tense ‘Grows’ instead of ‘Grew’. The economy grows by 1.4
percent means it is still on that growth number. If it eventually changes to 2%.
[sic] We will be reporting 1.4% as complete Past [sic] tense.”

People with little understanding of English grammar
were persuaded by this grammatically impoverished defense. First, as I showed
earlier, the name for the tense that describes actions that started in the past
but with effect that continues in the present, which is what the defender
describes, is “present perfect tense,” not “simple present tense.” Second, it
is ungrammatical to use the morphological inflection of the simple present
tense, that is, “grows,” to indicate the present perfect tense. The present
perfect tense is correctly indicated with the linking verb “has” or “have” and
the past participial inflection of action verbs, such as “grown.”

In last week’s column, I said “grew” was the
appropriate verb to use because the third quarter ended in September, and the
data for the fourth quarter would be different from the preceding one. In other
words, the third quarter has no continuity with the fourth, just like the
second had no continuity with the third.That makes it a simple
past tense, also called a preterite. This isn’t a different “perspective.” It’s
a basic rule. You either know it or you don’t.

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). For more than 13 years, he wrote two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust). From November 2018, his political commentaries appear on the back page of the Nigerian Tribune on Saturday.In April 2014, Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.